The British forces far outnumbered the Germans, and, almost miraculously, in one spot a division did break open a three-quarter-mile gap in the German first and second trench lines. How to exploit this opportunity? Although French had plenty of infantry in reserve, he had erred badly in stationing them too far from the front, having forgotten that what appeared on a map as a quick few hours' march could take several times that long when troops had to funnel single file along narrow country roads clogged with ambulance wagons of wounded men heading in the other direction, and then through narrower, winding communication trenches and a ragged morass of shell holes, all under a torrential rain.
By the time his two reserve divisions arrived at their attacking positions after an exhausting all-night march, the gap had closed and the Germans had moved up their own reserves. British and German corpses and body parts from the first day's fighting littered the ground and the air was rank with the smell of death. It was then, on the second day of the battle, that Haig ordered the fateful advance by the two weary, inexperienced reserve divisions directly against hilltop German machine guns and uncut barbed wire. This was the sight, and the slaughter, that German officers observed with such amazement.
To Captain Graham Pole of the Northumberland Fusiliers, one of the advancing units, his commander dispatched this message: "The C.O. wishes the attack to be carried out with bayonets in the true Northumbrian fashion." How did it feel to be one of the men in this doomed attack? Private Harry Fellows, who had been ordered to carry the message to Captain Pole, remembered:
The whole slope in front of me and as far away to the left as one could see was crowded with cheering men moving forward as fast as they could. And still the enemy had not fired a shot....
The leading men would have been about 100 yards from the German wire ... when all hell was let loose. As if from some predetermined signal the enemy machine guns opened up with a murderous fire, both from the front and enfilading fire [i.e., from the sides] from some buildings which had been out of sight behind some trees. Men began to stumble and fall, then to go down like standing corn before a scythe. The cap from the head of the lad in front of me flew from his head and he fell—I stumbled over him—and even to this day I feel no shame when I say that I stayed where I was: my face buried in the grass, and never had the good earth smelled so sweet.... The firing seemed to go on for hours. I afterwards learned that it was not even ten minutes. Bullets were cracking overhead and then it ceased...
After a few more minutes I rose to my knees and should I live to be a hundred I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. The whole slope was one mass of prone figures; some even lying on top of one another.... Many, like the lad I had stumbled over, would never move again. Many men, even though wounded themselves, were helping their wounded comrades back. Still the Germans held their fire.... Assisting a lad who had a bullet wound in his foot, I arrived back at the trench near where the Scots had their machine gun.... One of the team offered me his water bottle: water was extremely scarce. I still remember the emotion in his voice as he said, "Ye nae had a chance."
...It was nerve racking to hear the cries of the men lying wounded on the slope. Even if the Germans had allowed us to help them—which I believe they would—we had no stretchers....
Looking around I was pleased to see that Captain Pole was safe and remembering the message I still had for him I handed it to him with an apology for the delay. After reading it he said, with a tremor in his voice, "It doesn't matter now. But isn't that just what we tried to do?"
In this brief spasm of carnage, out of 10,000 British officers and men, more than 8,000 were killed, wounded, or missing.
As with many episodes from this war, it is hard for us to see the attack on September 26, 1915, as anything other than a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions their men faced. Strikingly, however—and this is especially typical of the war's early battles, when all soldiers were professionals or volunteers—few survivors talked of it in this way. For them to question the generals' judgment would have meant, of course, asking if their fellow soldiers had died in vain. From the need to avoid such questions are so many myths about wars born.
One of the units ravaged that day, for instance, was the 8th Battalion of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment. Of its 25 officers, 24 were casualties in little more than an hour, along with 556—a majority—of its enlisted men. The battalion commander, Colonel Eden Vansittart, who had spent most of his long army career in India, witnessed much of the killing before being himself severely wounded. But in a long report on the battle he wrote two years later, he revealed not the slightest anger at the suicidal position he and his men were put in, only praise for their good form. "They advanced as if on parade, and under perfect discipline, till they reached the enemy's undamaged barbed wire entanglements, beyond which they were unable to go, and here our losses were very great." A decade later, when he was retired, he still did not question the decision to attack; his main concern remained that the authors of the multivolume official history of the war, for whom he prepared another report, "bring out more sharply the gallant conduct" of the battalion.
The fighting at Loos continued sporadically for several weeks more. Among the British soldiers killed whose bodies were never found was Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon of the 8th Black Watch, whose sister, when she was married a few years later in Westminster Abbey, placed her wedding bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in his memory. She would survive into the next century as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Riding a white horse, Sir John French visited the troops several times, at one point spending two hours talking to injured men at a first-aid station near the front. "Dead, dying and badly wounded all mixed up together," he wrote to Winifred Bennett. "Poor dear fellows they bear their pain gloriously and many of them gave me a smile of recognition."
In the end, the Allies gained a mile or two of ground, but once again, the losses were overwhelmingly on the attackers' side, with more than 61,000 British casualties. "It was impossible to bury them all.... You'd go along the trenches and you'd see a boot and puttee sticking out, or an arm or a hand, sometimes faces," remembered one soldier. "Not only would you see, but you'd be walking on them, slipping and sliding.... But if you ever had to write home about a particular mate you'd always say that he got it cleanly and quickly with a bullet and he didn't know what had happened." Bloated to the size of cats, rats feasted on the bodies left in no man's land, beginning with the eyes, the softer flesh of the face, and the liver, then working their way onward as the days passed, leaving only skeletons draped in scraps of khaki. At night, soldiers in their trenches could hear a constant rattling, as rats nosed their way among the tin cans and canteens around the skeletons, looking for bits of food.
Still, British generals denied the awesome power of the chief weapon involved. "The introduction of the Machine Gun," declared a memo from French's headquarters to the Ministry of Munitions two months after the battle, "has not, in the opinion of the General Staff, altered the universally accepted principle that superior numbers of bayonets closing with the enemy is what finally turns the scale." Even some two and a half years later, in May 1918, the British forces would have only one machine gun for every 61 men. The Canadians would have one for every 13, the French one for every 12.
Day after day the size of the British death tolls sank in, and "Roll of Honour" listings spread across the columns of the Times, with officers' names in slightly larger type. A volley of recriminations quickly began over who was to blame: French, who had stationed the reserves too far away, or Haig, who had launched the troops directly against undamaged German wire and machine guns. With the Times correspondent Repington on French's side, some of this argument again spilled into the press. French got the Times to publish a dispatch of his that misleadingly implied that the reserves were closer to the front than they really had been. But the battle that counted was within the government,
and there the winner was foreordained. Haig simply wrote to Kitchener laying all the blame on French: "My attack, as has been reported, was a complete success," he said nonsensically, "...and reserves should have been at hand then."
Kitchener demanded an explanation of the Loos debacle from French, and in Parliament several speakers attacked the beleaguered field marshal, one mentioning the presence of women at his headquarters. Milner, frustrated and on the sidelines, spoke acidly in the House of Lords of the official "furtive admissions" and "laboured explanations" for the terrible casualty toll. The King himself crossed the Channel to sample military opinion firsthand. "Douglas Haig came to dinner and I had a long talk with him afterwards," he wrote in his diary. "He ... said the C-in-C was a source of great weakness to the Army, and no one had any confidence in him anymore." In a railway dining car in England, an officer overheard Asquith, Lloyd George, and the foreign secretary debating French's removal.
Compared to previous wars, at Loos, as in earlier battles, a strikingly high proportion of casualties were simply listed as "missing." Men might be mowed down by German fire in patches of ground not held long enough to recover the bodies, or there might not be any body to recover after a high-explosive shell blew someone into unrecognizable bits—and also killed any comrades who witnessed his end. Many of the British casualties counted as missing at Loos came on the day after the catastrophic slaughter of the reserve divisions. New troops were then thrown into the battle, among them the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards, John Kipling's unit, whose men had not slept or had much to eat during the preceding 48 hours. But despite their exhaustion, Lieutenant Kipling led his platoon through rubble at the pit head of a mine, shouting "Come on boys," and managed to capture at least one building occupied by German defenders. Late that afternoon, he vanished from sight. According to one account, he was wounded at a place the soldiers called Chalk Pit Wood and crawled into a building later seized by the Germans, but there was no additional news. A War Office telegram to his parents reported him missing in action.
The day the reserve divisions were mowed down at Loos thousands of people assembled in London's Trafalgar Square, long a favorite spot for protest rallies. They had come to raise their voices against conscription—which, it was clear, was soon going to be imposed to meet the army's insatiable demand for men. Charlotte Despard, no longer able to hold her antiwar feelings in check, was one of those who addressed the crowd—as was Sylvia Pankhurst. After she spoke, Pankhurst noticed boys hawking newspapers and carrying large placards. She could not make out what they were shouting, but finally one came close enough for her to read his placard: DEATH OF KEIR HARDIE.
She collapsed and had to be helped offstage. "I was not faint but stunned and stricken.... I felt as they who had lost their dearest in the War," she later wrote, "for the War had killed him, as surely as it had killed the men who went to the trenches." Hardie died in a Glasgow hospital, his failing health worsened by pneumonia. Supporters gathered for his funeral in that city a few days later, as the bullets continued to fly at Loos. Along the path of the procession, workmen, and sometimes soldiers, stood solemnly, their heads bared. With Hardie's family in attendance, Sylvia did not come, but she sent a wreath of laurel, with ribbons in the suffragette colors of purple, green, and white, as well as revolutionary red. The muffling chill of the times extended even to the funeral service, for the vicar said nothing of Hardie's long battle against war, speaking only of his youth in the Evangelical Union church.
In London, Sylvia put out a special issue of her Woman's Dreadnought filled with tributes to him, including her own passionate good-bye: "He was built for great strength, his head more grandly carved than any other; his deep-set eyes like sunshine distilled, as we see it through the waters of a pool in the brown earth." She called him the "greatest human being of our time." As in all the tens of thousands of words she wrote about Hardie over her lifetime, she did not mention his wife.
He remained a beacon for her, and in maintaining her own unremitting opposition to the war, she saw herself as carrying on his legacy. But making others feel the same way while men in their families were at the front proved as difficult for her as it had been for the man she loved. At one point the playwright George Bernard Shaw asked her, "How can you expect to convert the public when you cannot even convert your mother and Christabel?" Indeed, there was no hope of that. In October, Christabel renamed the Suffragette, the WSPU newspaper, Britannia, with the motto "For King, for Country, for Freedom." Its pages would from now on be filled with patriotic prose and poetry accompanied by images of Joan of Arc and other women warriors. The paper's nationalism became so extreme that one article attacked the Foreign Office for being "corrupted ... by Germanism, German blood, German and pro-enemy ties and sympathies. [It] must be CLEARED OUT and its whole staff replaced."
Seeking an ally, Christabel wrote to Alfred Milner, sharing with him her suspicions of secret Germanophiles hidden in high posts. "I absolutely agree with your criticism of the conduct of the war," he replied. But, he added, "where I differ from you is imputing evil motives to our rulers.... I think them incompetent—extremely so—...but I do not think that any of them is otherwise than anxious to do the best for his country." And he gently chided her for suspecting "everybody who has any foreign blood in his veins," pointing out that Queen Victoria was half German and that he himself had a German grandmother.
Christabel was not alone in her paranoia about German spies and sympathizers. As 1915 drew to a close there was an ever-greater hunger to find traitors or scapegoats whose actions would explain the lack of battlefield victories. During the war years, more than 90 plays about spies were performed in British theaters, abounding in sinister German servants in unsuspecting British homes, poisoned reservoirs, and secret radios sending messages to lurking U-boats. Scotland Yard was overwhelmed with an average of 300 tips a day about possible spies. Soldiers were dispatched on hundreds of missions to isolated homes and fields to check out reports of mysterious flashes at night thought to be signals to German airships. Woe to any homing pigeon fancier seen with his birds, which might be about to carry vital state secrets straight to Berlin. Actual German spies in Britain proved remarkably few. Most of them, in fact, were rounded up in the first days of the war, but the publicity-hungry Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard made sure that any such arrest or trial, no matter how minor, was trumpeted in the press.
In breaks from writing his multivolume history of the war and from sending optimistic dispatches to the Times from the Western Front, John Buchan lent a helping hand to the spy mania. In October 1915, just after Loos, he published what became his best-known book (later brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock), The Thirty-Nine Steps. In this novel and its sequels, Buchan essentially invented the most popular form of the modern spy story: a daring, athletic hero, chase scenes, friends who turn out to be enemies, enemies who turn out to be friends, coded messages, and grand conspiracies that will destroy everything if the hero cannot escape from a castle dungeon in time. With Britain's soldiers dug in below ground on a front that barely moved month after bloody month, the public was relieved and delighted to read stories like these, in which individual feats of boldness carried the day.
In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan's hero, Richard Hannay, foils the machinations of a whole network of German spies. Hannay is a colonial who has returned from various adventures in southern Africa just in time to help the "Old Country" in its hour of need. Significantly, the Old Country is not an industrialized nation of drab, crowded urban tenements and factories belching coal smoke, but a serene, pastoral landscape of moors and hills. Pursued by the evil Germans, Hannay races "through little old thatched villages and over peaceful lowland streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were those who sought my life; ay, and that in a month's time, unless I had the almightiest of luck ... men would be lying dead in English fields." In the novel'
s happy ending, Hannay, of course, nabs the spies just before they can spirit away stolen military plans on their yacht. The book, which sold more than a million copies in Buchan's lifetime, contributed to an upsurge of volunteers to become special police constables—a job in which many a middle-aged Briton too old for the trenches could still imagine himself catching a German spy.
No spies or conspiracies could explain the British failure at Loos, however, so the commander in chief was doomed. As French had predicted, they changed the bowler. To save face, he was given command of the Home Forces—all troops in Britain and Ireland, who were mainly in training—which was a bitter comedown. When the prime minister's emissary tried to soften the blow by telling him he would be ennobled as well, French wryly suggested he could become "Lord Sent-Homer." In recognition of his role in withstanding the German attacks at Ypres and of his Irish ancestry, he was made Viscount of Ypres and of High Lake, County Roscommon. But because Ypres became associated with so much lost British blood, the name never fully stuck, and contemporaries as well as later writers generally continued to refer to him as Sir John French. He remained popular with British troops, thousands of whom lined the road, cheering wildly, when he left his headquarters for the last time in December. At the dockside in Boulogne, there were more cheers from his old regiment, the 19th Hussars. For French, it was farewell to this front, but, as it would happen, the play was not over; one major act was yet to come.
His successor, of course, was Haig, who was fully confident that he could succeed where the capricious French had failed. "DH never shines at dinner," recorded an officer on his staff at this time, "but he was obviously in very good spirits, and kept silence merrily."
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 Page 21